Dell’Oro Group said the RAN market is on track in 2022 for a fifth consecutive year of growth, with global revenues projected to stay above US$40 billion by 2026.
Lead analyst Stefan Pongratz said: “Even with the unusual uncertainty surrounding the economy, the war in Ukraine, the supply chains, and China’s zero-Covid-19 policy, the baseline scenario assumes that risks have changed but the underlying fundamentals remain healthy.”
He said the global RAN market will be “expanding further over the near term before decelerating in the outer part of the forecast period”, which means growth will be flat in US dollars between last year and 2026.
The Chinese RAN market is expected to peak in 2022 before decelerating towards the end of the five-year period, Dell’Oro said.
The analyst company expects RAN investments in the North America region to peak in 2022 and then fall – or “give up some gains”, as Dell’Oro puts it, “in the outer part of the forecast period”.
Millimetre wave services are slower than expected, making up 2-4% of the total RAN market in 2022-26.
Also likely to slow is the market for massive MIMO – multiple input, multiple output. “Growth prospects are projected to slow somewhat, reflecting challenging comparisons in some of the advanced massive MIMO markets,” says Dell’Oro. But small-cell RAN revenues are projected to grow at a 6% a year, “underpinned by healthy 5G growth”, the analyst company adds in its Mobile RAN 5-Year Forecast Report.
